Question

Let’s say I have the following data in the Customers table: (nothing more)

ID   FirstName   LastName
-------------------------------
20   John        Mackenzie
21   Ted         Green
22   Marcy       Nate

What sort of SELECT statement can get me the number 22, in the ID column?

I need to do something like this to generate a unique ID. Sure I can let the system do this via auto-increment, but then how would I get the auto generated ID?

I thought of SELECT ID FROM Customers and counting the rows returned but this seems horribly inefficient, and in this case, it will incorrectly return “3”, though I need a unique ID of 23.

Answer 1

You can do

SELECT MAX(ID) FROM Customers;